Monthly Archives: August 2013

Why the U.S. needs to stay the fuck out of Syria’s conflict

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Sorry for the vulgarity, but sometimes it just seems like it’s necessary.

Anyway, as the U.S. is getting ready to start up a new campaign of military violence against some place most people in the U.S. can’t point out on a map, I just wanted to offer my rationalization for why we shouldn’t be involved in any way, shape, or form. My reasons could be the expected ones, which involve:

1. We have nothing to gain by killing people in Syria. They don’t matter to us. They’re having a civil war. Either make it about us, or do your own thing in your own miniscule corner of the world. We need to stop thinking our input is really all that important to people who generally don’t like us anyway.

2. Syria has never been a great friend to the U.S. anyway, and after we bomb them, they’re not going to suddenly think “You know, those Americans who dropped those bombs on our local hospital and killed many of my relatives seem like pretty okay guys. Maybe we should start conducting trade with them tomorrow after I visit everyone I’ve ever known in the hospital.”

3. All lists require a third item, and I hate being seen as someone who doesn’t do what other people do.

No, my reason is different, and it’s simple. As a matter of fact, I can sum it up in one word: Emus. And Australia.

emu

You see, in 1932, there was this war that was fought in Australia between the government of Australia and, well, emus. Yeah, those dorky looking birds that look a lot like ostriches but are called emus. Their most redeeming value and attribute is they make a really ridiculous sound when they speak. That’s about it. Oh, and they shit a lot.

Anyway, Australia was having this real problem with emus back in 1932 and decided it needed to stop them from eating all of their crops, so they did what any industrial nation would do and declared war on a bunch of stupid birds. So, mobilizing their army of soldiers and cannons, they went on a safari in the outback, put one on the barbie and then unleashed holy hell on the emu terror. Only, they discovered something they didn’t know before. When you shoot at a bunch of very fast moving birds, they run. And they run fast. They also hide. So, after the first skirmish, which I like to call The Battle of Waterfowl One, they discovered a few of them died, but most of them lived and ran away. This caused the Australian army to have to chase emus across the land, and they discovered that they didn’t do it very well. They also discovered that no matter how many times you shoot an emu, they tend to not die. They just take the shots and continue running. And the ones that are shot are now angry, so they come at you like, well, emus very angry after having been shot.

The war didn’t go well. By most accounts, the Australians lost this war, and it’s forever been considered one of the biggest military failures in all of history, right up there with Stonewell Jackson being shot by his own troops because he forgot to tell them he was returning from intelligence gathering and not to shoot at their own guy who might be coming at them from enemy lines really fast.

The point: War is quite often unexpected. Great nations were destroyed in the past because nations thought they were incapable of failing at military maneuvers. If you look at the Gulf War, that’s exactly what happened. We went in with the hubris of a nation that can’t be defeated and then after a great military campaign (fighting emu equivalents of enemies) we then ended up bogged down in a decade of minor skirmishes that continued to take the lives of American soldiers. We’re still there now.

So, we should be very wary of just jumping into a conflict because we heard they did bad things. Sure, we don’t want the next German Hitler running around, but not every conflict is Nazi Germany running around the world trying to enslave the population. Sometimes a regional conflict is just that: a regional conflict.

Just ask the Australians. I’m sure they’d love to talk about their great Emu War.

Why Continuum May Be the Most Subversive Television Show Ever to Air

Politics, Television, , , , , , , , , ,

The story is pretty interesting. It’s about a female police officer from the future of about 60 years who travels back in time to today, following a group of fugitives who are hell bent on causing terror. My friend Teramis wrote about the great writing of Continuum a few weeks ago, but I wanted to go in a different direction, mainly talking about the political implications of the show.

What makes the show so interesting is that the group that comes back in time, while being a terrorist organization, is also doing what they’re doing for the betterment of society. Which, when you think about it, is somewhat subversive on its own. The group, filled with really bad people, uses its evil tactics it used in the future to do its evil to the civilization of the past (today’s time). Their purpose is to change the past in hopes of providing for a better future.

The future is pretty interesting in this show, in that what has happened is that corporations have taken over everything, and people are now minions of the overseers, not the other way around. Freedoms are gone. People live their lives in futuristic splendor, but it’s pretty obvious that to get to that future, a lot of rights were trampled on, and a lot of people were made to live some pretty crappy lives at the expense of those who benefited.

What makes it really interesting is that when the main character returns to today’s time, her purpose is still to stop some very evil people from doing bad deeds in today’s time. But her eyes start to open up to the evil that exists in today’s time. This evil is the sort of thing that leads to the oppressive society that will one day emerge, and she is very much a cog in that wheel that uses the tools of technology to act as an enforcer of some very draconian rules.

What is interesting about the show is that there’s a real grey area here where I’m not sure she’s ever going to recognize that she’s actually the problem that came back in time. She thinks she’s doing the right thing, but as she’s doing it, the police agency she’s working with (in today’s time) is slowly becoming very much more oppressive.

I’m reminded of the whole very recent incident where the British government decided to haul in the domestic partner of a reporter it was targeting over the whole Snowden case. Without a warrant, or even a reason, the government hauled him in and imprisoned him for 9 hours (the maximum amount of time it was allowed before being forced to make a charge). What’s interesting is that no one seems to even recognize that a man’s rights were completely ignored for some kind of governmental vengeance. And no one will ever be held accountable.

That is exactly what Continuum is all about. The good guys in this show are the usual cops and white hat wearing people who always save the day. Yet, they are required to do some really horrible things in order to “get the bad guys”. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such grey area in a show before. There are times when I’m watching it when I start to lose focus on who I should be rooting for, even though the show maintains its narrative in a way that keeps you thinking the oppressors are still the good guys.

It’s an interesting premise, and it’s definitely an interesting experiment. If they play it out as the are already doing it, and SyFy doesn’t cancel it, this could turn out to be one of the most important shows to be on television.

Why Politicians Do The Things They Do

Politics, , , , , , , , ,
Little Brucoe knows exactly why politicians do what they do. They want to hug him because he's so cute.
Little Brucoe knows exactly why politicians do what they do. They want to hug him because he’s so cute.

For those who have been following the exploits of New York politicians, specifically one who seems to text graphic pictures of his private parts to random women and the other who was laughed out of office for paying for high priced hookers, it leaves one wondering how either one of these individuals actually thinks he has a chance in hell of ever regaining a political career. Senator Barbara Boxer mentioned yesterday that Warner needed to drop out of the race, and chances are pretty good that even though the highest ranking Democrat (his party) wants him out, he’s probably not going to comply.

Which leaves one wondering how they can actually imagine they have a chance of serving their constituents again. Critics of these two have been making statements about how both are incapable of providing their constituents with service, yet neither one of them seems all that concerned about the criticism. Sure, they don’t like that they’re being criticized, but at the same time they’re not planning to go away any time soon.

This leaves me wondering how this fits into the greater schemes of political science itself, and by that, I mean how does this make any sense to the central axiom of American government theory, which is that politicians do everything they do in hopes of being elected and re-elected. Everything else is irrelevant. If this were the case, then we should expect that one of them wouldn’t have pursued expensive hookers while the other one would stop sending pictures of his cock to random women. Or at least stay faithful to his wife, who happens to be an insider with the Clintons. But instead, we keep getting very interesting, and titillating stories from these two.

And they’re not the only ones. The mayor of San Diego seems to have a problem dealing with just about any woman he comes across without looking for a hook up from her. If he followed the central axiom of political theory, then he’d stop trying to score with every woman he comes across. But that hasn’t happened. He won’t resign either, because he doesn’t seem to think it’s a detriment to his serving in office.

Which brings me to something I brought up a long time ago while pursuing my doctorate in political science. It was understandably laughed at back then, and probably will be again, but a colleague and I came up with this joke of a theory that perhaps the central axiom of political theory is not incorrect, but that it isn’t finished. If you follow the logic, you would come to the conclusion that politicians want to be elected and re-elected after being in office. The theory my colleague and I played around with was essentially the next step. If they get elected, so what? What does that lead them to? Does serving in office give you the ultimate satisfaction you’ve been seeking all your life? Or does it allow you to provide for satisfaction because of the results of that office?

Let’s explore that. Our theory was a joke back then, which I’ll mention now and then get back to seriousness. We postulated that the reason why politicians do what they do is not to become re-elected, but to get dates. In other words, the reason they do what they do is to appeal to the opposite sex (or same sex if that’s their thing). When they score, they have effectively achieved all that they have sought out to do.

Yes, it was a joke, and no one took us seriously. But what if it was somewhat true? What if the reason why politicians did what they do is to achieve some ultimate goal? For some, like the ones mentioned in this article, maybe it is about getting dates or appealing to the opposite sex. For others, perhaps the end goal is power. And for even more, perhaps it is the accumulation of wealth. We’ve seen over and over again that people in power are easily corrupted in the end, even if we don’t always know what it is that’s going to corrupt them.

So, the bigger question that should be asked is what exactly is it that a particular politician seeks as an ultimate result. If it’s sex, then we look for that arena. If it’s money, then we should expect just that. And so on. The point is: If this theory is correct, then perhaps our motivations we put behind political science are a bit premature, in that they lead to something, but they aren’t the thing that actually point the final finger. An example is a politician who is leaving office after a set of years having served. Political scientists tend to ignore the individual from this point on, figuring they’re nothing more than a lame duck and not worthy of further exploration. But my theory looks at them as even yet another variable that needs to be studied, because something caused them to realize that politics was no longer worth their effort. It’s all an end game sum type of situation where there are intricate cost-benefit analyses being played out before our eyes. Sometimes, we can see it clearly, as we can see when a politician is outed for some behavior that goes contrary to stated intentions. Other times, it’s not so easy to see.

But studying politics from this direction means we might actually start to find the true motivations behind why politicians do what they do. This is what the intelligence services have done for as long as there have been administrators. They find out what the person really wants and then provide that for them. That usually leads to the beginning of a long, lasting relationship. But they’d never have succeeded if they went into the situation convinced that all administrators do what they do because they’re interested in keeping their job tomorrow. Yet, that’s exactly how political theory deals with this issue. If you think it through, that’s exactly what we do.

Anyway, so from now on I think I’ll be looking at politics from the angle of “what’s in it for me” or for the politician himself/herself. What I suspect I’ll find is that the answers aren’t that much different from the expectations. What I do believe I’ll find, however, is that we might stop being so stubborn about actually studying the real reasons why people actually do what they do.